RAF Chinooks and A400Ms to Fight UK Wildfires From the Air
Share this story After the hottest summer Britain has ever recorded, the government has decided that some wildfires are simply out of reach for firefighters on foot. Its answer is in the hangars of the Royal Air Force: the twin-rotor CH-47 Chinook and the A400M Atlas...
Mitsubishi A6M Zero: The Fighter That Shocked the Allies
Share this story In the summer of 1940, Chinese pilots over Chongqing met a new Japanese fighter that seemed to break the rules. It flew farther than a fighter should, turned tighter than anything they had, and carried cannon.Warnings from China, including from the...
Sikorsky VS-300: The Wobbly Machine That Gave Us the Helicopter
Share this story On 14 September 1939, two weeks after war broke out in Europe, a 50-year-old engineer in a business suit and a felt hat climbed into an open frame of steel tubes in Stratford, Connecticut. Ropes tied the machine to the ground. When Igor Sikorsky...
Battle of Longewala 1971: Hawker Hunters Against a Tank Column
Share this story Just after midnight on 5 December 1971, a company of about 120 Indian soldiers at a lonely border post in the Thar Desert heard engines in the dark. Coming towards them was a Pakistani armoured column: dozens of tanks, infantry in trucks, an entire...
Douglas DC-3: The Airliner That Made Flying Pay for Itself
Share this story In the mid-1930s, C.R. Smith, the president of American Airlines, picked up the telephone and would not put it down. On the other end was Donald Douglas, who had a perfectly good airliner, the DC-2, and no particular wish to build another. Smith...
Typhoon Champi Grounds Taiwan: Nearly 1,000 Flights Cancelled
Share this story On a normal Friday, Taiwan’s airports are among the busiest in East Asia. On Friday, 23 October 2026, most of the island simply stopped, and the flights stopped with it.Typhoon Champi, at one point a super typhoon and one of the strongest storms...
C-5 Galaxy Landing Gear Down at 22,000 Feet Over Slovakia
Share this story At 22,000 ft (about 6,700 m), landing gear is supposed to be folded away and forgotten. So when photographer Ján Kolárik pointed his lens at a US Air Force C-5 Galaxy crossing Slovakia, he caught something genuinely odd: one of the giant...
KC-10 Extender Leaves the Boneyard for Omega Air Refueling
Share this story On 20 October 2026, a grey three-engined tanker that had spent years parked in the Arizona desert took off from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and turned east. On paper it is no longer an Air Force jet. KC-10A Extender 86-0034 is now N82247, and it...
B-21 Raider Wingspan Measured at About 152 Feet From Satellite Image
Share this story For almost four years after its unveiling, the most basic number about America’s newest bomber was a guessing game. How far does the B-21 Raider reach from wingtip to wingtip? The Air Force never said. Northrop Grumman never said. Then a...
MW-1: The Luftwaffe Tornado’s Cold War Bomblet Dispenser
Share this story If the Cold War had turned hot in Central Europe, one of West Germany’s main answers to waves of Warsaw Pact tanks would have been a box under the belly of a Tornado. The MW-1, short for Mehrzweckwaffe 1, or multi-purpose weapon 1, was a huge...
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